Bienvenidos! Welcome!A blog about Tau-Chain, TML and Agoras.

Tau-Chain.info is an unofficial blog that gathers information from various Internet sites about IDNI projects: Tau, Tau-Chain, Tau Meta Lenguaje and Agoras. This blog does not belong nor is it part of the official Tau project. The purpose of the blog is to make the project known, in an independent way, to people.​Tau is a revolutionary blockchain platform designed to scale up social consensus and accelerate knowledge creation in a decentralized network. Agoras will be an advanced marketplace for knowledge and computational resources built on this framework.

The blockchain space has been flooded with over-hyped projects claiming to be "game-changers." While the fact of the matter is that most are nowhere near as revolutionary as their marketing campaigns make them out to be, there are a select few that actually do have the potential to serve as platforms for unprecedented transformation of industries and society.

One such project that's been overlooked by many due to being very early on in development, highly technical in nature to the point of being near-incomprehensible to most without extensive computer programming experience, and not yet given any real publicity as its small team has been focused on proof-of-concept before marketing:

For these main three reasons, Tauchain has been flying quietly below the radar.

Yet, the few who've invested the time in understanding what exactly this project is and the potential implications of its successful deployment seem to agree: this could very well be "the next biggest thing" - as unprofessionally overly-sensationalistic such a phrase may be - since Bitcoin and Ethereum came onto the scene...​

Up until recently, there was a mere handful of individuals following this project, spearheaded by acclaimed genius Israeli developer, Ohad Asor.

A child mathematics prodigy enrolled in university at age 12, Asor later began working on the project after discovering the core concept via a colleague. Putting his brains to work programming what might come to actualization as one of the most significant breakthroughs in computer programming, his work on Tau utilizes the foundational advantages of blockchain technology in tandem with a highly-innovative programming meta-language and knowledge economy, the implications of which may be impossible to sum up in any single piece of writing.

To-date, the direction of the project has not been on the business side of things, but the development of code itself. (A noteworthy differentiation from the majority of blockchain projects which have prioritized polished whitepapers and flashy ICO first). Thus, little focus has been given to articulating the expanded vision for its practical applications in everyday, non-technical language - only a very few with the background to understand the technical complexities, able to see the potential impact of its completion.

However, as attention towards the Tauchain has grown, there has been a increasing distillation of the project essence & vision into language more-accessible to the non-technically-inclined. And the consensus is in: this is a project to keep an eye on for very good reasons.​

As the above vision and description - sourced from the main website - summarizes above, the key essence of Tauchain is enabling the scaling of discussions and collaboration.

Why is this so important?

Let's consider...

Social media has allowed billions of people to connect across the globe, chat, and share information. Yet when it comes to effectively collaborating and solving society's greatest challenges, the current generation of social media platforms have not proven as suitable tools.

Yes, we've formed groups and forums to have conversations. Though what generally tends to happen as a result of those threads? Not much. There can be a great deal of information conveyed within them; however, the more people that join, the more crowded the spaces become, the denser the fog of information listed in linear threads there is to sort through, and there are generally no organizing principles or structures by which that information can be put properly into place within action plans for solving large-scale problems requiring elaborate exploration and consensus on a great amount of interconnected details.

To ground that down from a more abstract conceptualization to something more tangible...

Not only are there all sorts of scattered discussions across multiple forums and social media platforms regarding societal challenges such as those outlined in the United Nation's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, there are an estimated 10 million Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) directed towards a vast variety of causes relevant to those same (and different) goals, as well as countless educational institutions and research organizations working on different projects and initiatives highly relevant to the work millions of those others are. However, despite the tremendous amount of common aims and goals, the majority of these distinct groups, institutions, and organizations are largely operating siloed from one another. And even within themselves, there are countless bottlenecks limiting the extent of effectiveness in successful collaboration.

To-date, large-scale projects collaborative projects - such as the Human Genome Project, for example - have required billions of dollars worth of investment to establish the infrastructure for sharing data across vast networks of institutions and organizations. Yet, for the millions of groups working towards solving other various challenges, such a scale of infrastructure which would successfully enable global collaboration between thousands of other stakeholders in shared societal goals remains inaccessible.

This is part of the value proposition Tauchain presents: providing a foundational technological stack/platform which could effectively serve as a bridge between a limitless number of individual and/or groups requiring the scaling of discussions essential to developing the strategic architecture of solutions to a broad range of challenges - complete with sets of features and functions birthing entirely unprecedented opportunities. (Which may not be quickly or easily seen, explained or grasped upon first glance).

While there may be a great deal of complexity to these features and the possibilities created through their introduction, we shall hereforth attempt a simplified overview of the few most pertinent, beginning with those listed on the website...​

Sure enough, for those of us not highly-inclined in the technical intricacies of computer programming, these descriptions may not paint a clear picture. Though even if understanding what all that means, that's still merely the tip of the iceberg and far from enough to get a firm grasp on what all is coming together with this development.

While the full scope of writings available on the Tauchain blog, as well as the collections of writing by @dana-edwards, may begin to better-articulate the breadth & depth of functionality & capabilities, this is but a brief summary of key points as understood by this author through a limited amount of research:The core innovation: Tau Meta-Language (TML).​

Or in other words, TML is a development which shall enable not merely a direct translation between language - as a basic conversion of English to Mandarin, for example - but the extraction of MEANING from a wide variety of types of language, both verbally spoken/written and those utilized in computer programming, such that the knowledge encoded within language may be stored within a repository and easily accessed (whether for use in basic inquiries, consensus-derivation, collaborative research projects, Decentralized Autonomous Organization functions and smart contracts, or other) irregardless of the language an inquiring person or program may speak/read or be programmed in.

The scope & significance of such an unparalleled breakthrough is difficult to overstate.

Whether in the worlds of conventional everyday language, computer science, industry-specific subdomains with a complex variety of customized organizational models, niche institutional arenas housing their own bodies of knowledge in unique formats, or far less formalized groups & cultures utilizing constantly-evolving slang in their internal communications - there exist thousands of languages being used across the globe within a range of systems designed for the facilitation of solving all sorts of problems. Yet despite many of these serving their purposes well within the boundaries/limits of their systems/organizations/communities, many of their consequential accomplishments exist in isolation from one another, separated by language barriers - whereas multiple groups working towards similar ultimate ends would immeasurably benefit through the synergy of sharing, combining, and leveraging each others' developments in collaborative efforts.

One aspect of TML (Tau Meta-Language) is to serve as a bridge between parties operating in different languages - to remove those language barriers preventing/slowing effective communication & collaboration - such that all contributed knowledge and data sets may be compiled into a single database, accessible to all (permitted) parties and available for utilization in programs or context of a different language than originally contributed in.

(Yet still only one of many aspects, one single component enabling numerous other functionalities of the systems which could be built upon Tau's broader technology stacks.)​

This concept of a semantic translator paired with a shared knowledge base itself is not new. One such comparable project, possibly the largest of its type, would be Cyc:​

“Cyc is the world's longest-lived artificial intelligence project, attempting to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and "rules of thumb" about how the world works (think common sense knowledge but focusing more on things that rarely get written down or said, in contrast with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via Google or Wikipedia), with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations that were not preconceived."

Meaning - applications built on Tau may utilize all the strengths of a blockchain architecture, including but not limited to the numerous benefits of decentralized models and smart-contract capabilities.

This is where the possibilities really begin to emerge.

For example: the knowledge contributed to Tauchain's repository becomes both monetizable for contributors and easily-accessible for utilization in a variety of applications, from consensus polls to research projects to DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) / automated business operations, and more - the value of which, becoming directly measurable, and the corresponding compensation able to be distributed back to contributors accordingly via smart contracts.

The first official application being developed for launch in tandem with Tau, Agoras, is being built (partly) for these purposes:​

Now, while some of the basic pieces of the puzzle have been addressed above, there is another key aspect to Tauchain that while has not been labelled outright as such, could be viewed in the context similar to that as the description of Cyc above:

A.I.

The distinction - and perhaps reason why the Tauchain team has not (yet) chosen to emphasize the A.I. component - is that it is not so much artificial intelligence in the sense most people understand/view it, but rather more something along the lines of augmented and/or automated intelligence - a set of tools enabling (comparatively) advanced automated commands & programs for purposes such as (though not limited to):

searching a knowledge-base not for keywords, but for information & dataset compilation relevant to specific inquiries reliant upon on the extraction of meaning and verification of truths as pertaining to the context of the inquiries, with language barriers removed

deriving evolving consensuses from ongoing large-scale group discussions (and feeding those dynamic information sets into other programs, projects, inquiries, or smart-contracts in real-time)

​

(in application for program development), validating computer programming scripts, so as to:

eliminate the need for trust between developers and those contracting their services

audit for identification of coding bugs, such that no software may be released until working 100%

compiling information from other databases/repositories for the purposes of growing Tauchain's own, such that the above-stated applications may have an expanding knowledge-base from which to draw more accurate data - thus increasing capacities for greater effectiveness in a broader range of applications serving a wider variety of needs

​

Now, for how all this shall be translated into such conceptual theory in a tangible user experience... time shall tell.

As with most other blockchains, Tauchain (and Tau Meta-Language) are merely a foundational layer upon which an infinite number of applications with both distinct and interconnected user interfaces may be developed for a wide range of industries, communities, institutions, markets, organizations, and groups of nearly any kind, public or private. Even Agoras' launch may only be a starting point, with any entrepreneur or developer able to connect into its knowledge economy for utilization in their own customized dapps - whether on Tau itself, Ethereum, or other third-generation blockchains.

From platforms and protocols to faciliate collaborative research between scientific institutions and/or economic thinktanks, to governmental decision-making in which citizen participation is able to be streamlined and incentivized, to entirely new breeds of social networks enabling the shift from simply consuming information and sharing content to engaging in and contributing to discussions - the direct value of our input derived via augmented intelligence, factored into consensus polls and problem-solving, and proportionately rewarded via smart-contracts - or all three of the above plus IoT (Internet of Things) sensor datafeeds interconnecting with each other...

The possibilities might only be limited to the imagination of the visionaries and system architects - nearly all developmental resources becoming fully-available, limited by neither language barriers nor traditional obstacles in scaling discussion between the human contributors.

These may be aspects of an integrated planetary vision which many pioneers in the blockchain space have already foreseen and have been working towards. However, the infrastructural components Tauchain aspires to deliver could play no less a fundamental role in the actualization of these shared goals and outcomes than the introduction of blockchain technology itself.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed.

It may be possible that even if the technical development of Tauchain is fully-completed, any variety of factors could restrict the adoption required to see the entire project through to success. Ultimately, it is not the initial innovation that shall drive the success of any blockchain project, but the ecosystem of developers building applications upon them and size/strength of userbase which determine whether Tauchain emerges victorious, or there shall be other ventures building upon the same core principles who can pull off the entrepreneurial side of network growth better.

Either way, it is clear that in the world of abundantly over-hyped blockchain projects claiming to be "game-changers," Tauchain may be among the handful of few well-deserving of that title to keep tabs on - if not hopping onboard as a stakeholder contributing to the project & vision, oneself...

As we can see from the current trend in crypto there is now a move toward privacy. Most people underestimate in my opinion the utility of these cryptographic advances. In this blogpost I will highlight a particular advance enabled by these new cryptographic (and hardware techniques such as trusted execution environment) which can be of massive benefit to the long term believers in Tauchain.

The problem: Anyone can copy the code Ohad writes if it's open source​So we have a problem with Tauchain where all of the code Ohad is writing with regard to TML is open source and on Github. This allows a competitor to simply steal his best ideas and in a sense rob the token holders who actually funded the development of the code. This happens very often as we see a new innovation in the crypto space and soon later we see a new ICO or a new group come out of no where acting as if they originated the technology. In some cases the new group may even be much more centralized, more secretive, and very well funded.

The solution: Secret contracts (private source code and execution)The trusted execution environment allows for the protection of intellectual property rights on the hardware level. While sMPC (secure multiparty computation) can also achieve similar ends on the software level. The idea being that this provides a solution to idea theft where a community can keep certain critical pieces of code, data, algorithms, or other unique features secret. This creates an entirely new way to monetize knowledge, code, and ideas, which Agoras will be uniquely positioned to leverage.

Guy Zyskind of the Enigma Project provides the definition for what secret contracts are and how they work. The Enigma Project deserves credit for introducing this technology and for identifying a major problem in the cryptospace. Traditionally on Ethereum or all other current platforms when you release a DApp your code has to be open source. It is not possible to create a closed or private source decentralized app. In addition the app has to be executed in the open so all data running through it is public.

Strategic implementation of private knowledge and source code can allow Tauchain to maintain a dominant positionIn most cases the world benefits if knowledge is shared. In fact I'm in favor most of the time of sharing as much knowledge as is safe. The problem with algorithms, source code, and certain kinds of knowledge is that by sharing that knowledge it provides a competitive advantage to people who have more financial resources. These individuals can simply see Github and copy. They can hire programmers to compete with Tauchain and Agoras developers and as long as the code is open there will be no real reason to buy the Agoras token long term.

What if the Tauchain development team and Agoras developers decide to implement private knowledge bases? What if it becomes possible to run code in a trusted execution environment so that other developers around the world cannot see the code or the algorithms? This would allow Tauchain to build Agoras in such a way that no other project will be capable of duplicating it. This would lock in the value backed by the community brainpower into the Agoras token making it a true knowledge token which cannot simply by copied with ease by another project.

In fact this is a strategy that developers making apps using Enigma's Secret Contracts are looking into as we speak. This competitive advantage of secrecy will change the landscape of the cryptospace. What does this enable for Agoras? Imagine an encrypted Github which developers can contribute to but only the developers can see the code? Imagine after the code is written that no one else can see the code if the code is set to run privately? This would allow developers to code in secret and have the code run on computers without anyone knowing what the code is.

This can open up security vulnerabilities but Tauchain can defend against these. In particular it matters what is private and what is public. Critical aspects can be private while security critical areas can always be kept public. There may even be ways to prove that the code doesn't behave in a certain way without actually sharing the code (using advanced cryptography). In fact my favored way of implementing this feature would be to timelock the release of the source code by a number of months of years.

The idea isn't to keep things closed forever or secret forever. Privacy is about access control and about keeping things secret long enough to maintain a competitive advantage. A time delay to unlock the source code for example could work. It is even possible to allow the community to use puzzle based time lock encryption to have to mine to get the source code released early (if there is a serious need or threat). In this way all secret blocks of code could be unlockable but not for free and this would make it less likely that the community will seek to unlock it unless there is a genuine reason (beyond just to steal ideas).

What do you think about these ideas? If you agree with this or disagree then comment below. Strategic IP (intellectual property) is used by major corporations to give themselves a competitive advantage. The crypto community can do the same thing in ways the legal mechanisms can't do. In fact it can be done in a more fair and better way because often the people or companies awarded IP rights aren't the actual inventors. A knowledge economy is fantastic but if the knowledge is just harvested by big corporations monitoring the wide open network then it's going to be hard to bring value to a knowledge token.

UPDATE: Many people ask where to buy Agoras. The problem is it's not widely available on centralized exchanges. The only exchange I know that has it is Bitshares. So if anyone really wants to buy Agoras (AGRS) which is the token of discussion in this post feel free to buy it at:https://openledger.io/market/AGRS_BTC

42 million intermediate tokens total. Current price is: 0.00010700 BTC which is around 70 cents. This is the cheapest price I've seen it in a while because for a long time it was $1.50-$1.30 range. This is a very speculative token at this time so buy at your own risk as I'm not providing any financial advice. I'm a holder of this token of course and have been for years.​References

“We are moving into an era where cities will matter more than states and supply chains will be a more important source of power than militaries — whose main purpose will be to protect supply chains rather than borders. Competitive connectivity is the arms race of the 21st century.”

-- Parag Khanna [1], [2]

A network is made of lines and switches, right?

Lots have been told about the network scaling effects [3], including attempts by myself [4-12] ... which compels me to introduce the not so frivolous notion of network forces.

These forces are expressed in several laws. I though initially to say 'forces' and 'laws' here, but I realize they are quite objective and physical emergenta [13], indeed.

In my ''Geodesic by Tauchain'' [4] article of about couple of months ago I emphasized over the Huber-Hettinga Law [14],[15] of how cost of switching literally defines the 'orographic' [16] topology of a network [17].

The more vertical by centralization a network is - the more it must deplete information - to omit, to ignore calls from the deeps or to even actively suppress or silence nodes. To cope with the stream by strangling it. Simply due to lesser capacity, less degrees of freedom [21]. Geodesic networks possess higher entropy [22] and therefore are richer. They bolster higher both Scrooge [10] and Spawn [11] factors. With other words:

The flatter the network - the richer [23] it is.

Maybe the explanation on why the wealthiest-healthiest societies tend to be those who are with biggest economic-political freedom. [24]

Naturally the Huber-Hettinga Law led me to the elementary-watson [25] conclusion of the power and value of Tau as the ultimate über [4]-switch. So far so good.

Now lets stare in the Lines. Here comes Nick Szabo [26].

Nick Szabo - a lawyer AND computer scientist - is a legendary figure from the great 'Archaic era of crypto' [27] - the 1990es when he, together with the other cypherpunk [28] titans like Tim May [29], Wei Dai [30], Bob Hettinga [15] etc. etc., poured the very baserock foundations in a staggering detail of what we enjoy now as Crypto [31] in the post-Satoshi [32] era.

It is THEIR vision came true we all now live in.

Bitcoin was a detonation of namely that critical mass of fused thoughts, of namely these very smart people, piled up and compressed by the connective network forces of the early internet [33].

No, I do not mean at all Szabo's most famous thing - the 1994 coining of the term of 'smart contracts' [34]. In fact I deeply and strongly reject the very notion of 'smart contracts' - as utter non-sense, even as an oxymoron - which is an yuge separate problem, which I suspect that I nailed it, and I'll address in series of dedicated articles starting in the upcoming weeks...

I mean something much more valuable, what I call the Szabo Law.

When we hear the phrase 'networking effects' the first what comes to mind is the famous Metcalfe law [35]. ​

''Metcalfe's Law is related to the fact that the number of unique connections in a network of a number of nodes (n) can be expressed mathematically as the triangular number n(n − 1)/2, which is proportional to n2 asymptotically (that is, an element of BigO(n2)).''

In the above order of appearance these network forces laws respect quantitatively the basic properties of a network as:

- Huber-Hettinga Law - the cost of switches and routing.

- Metcalfe Law - the number of nodes, i.e. switches defining the number of unique connections or lines.

- Szabo Law - the cost of the lines and connecting.

All these Laws are scaling [9], [11] laws. Before we to come back to and continue on Szabo Law, we have to briefly mention another one [3].: ​

''So what is “scaling”? In its most elemental form, it simply refers to how systems respond when their sizes change. What happens to cities or companies if their sizes are doubled? What happens to buildings, airplanes, economies, or animals if they are halved? Do cities that are twice as large have approximately twice as many roads and produce double the number of patents? Should the profits of a company twice the size of another company double? Does an animal that is half the mass of another animal require half as much food?'' ... With Dirk Helbing (a physicist, now at ETH Zurich) and his student Christian Kuhnert, and later with Luis Bettencourt (a Los Alamos physicist now an SFI Professor), Jose Lobo (an economist, now at ASU), and Debbie Strumsky (UNC-Charlotte), we discovered that cities, like organisms, do indeed exhibit “universal” power law scaling, but with some crucial differences from biological systems.Infrastructural measures, such as numbers of gas stations and lengths of roads and electrical cables, all scale sublinearly with city population size, manifesting economies of scale with a common exponent around 0.85 (rather than the 0.75 observed in biology). More significantly, however, was the emergence of a new phenomenon not observed in biology, namely, superlinear scaling: socioeconomic quantities involving human interaction, such as wages, patents, AIDS cases, and violent crime all scale with a common exponent around 1.15. Thus, on a per capita basis, human interaction metrics (which encompass innovation and wealth creation) systematically increase with city size while, to the same degree, infrastructural metrics manifest increasing savings. Put slightly differently: with every doubling of city size, whether from 20,000 to 40,000 people or 2M to 4M people, socioeconomic quantities – the good, the bad, and the ugly – increase by approximately 15% per person with a concomitant 15% savings on all city infrastructure-related costs.

Which probably comes to denote the shear size of the network in STEM (space, time, energy, mass) [36], I'm not sure, but I have some strong suspicions about the unity of matter, structure and action which I will expose and share some other time.

What I call Szabo's Law reveals in his ''Transportation, divergence, and the industrial revolution''(Thu, Oct 16, 2014) [37] that similarly to Metcalfe's (''double the population, quadruple the economy'') there is power-law [38] correlation between the cost of connections or links or lines ... and the value of the network, too.: ​

''Metcalfe's Law states that a value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its nodes. In an area where good soils, mines, and forests are randomly distributed, the number of nodes valuable to an industrial economy is proportional to the area encompassed. The number of such nodes that can be economically accessed is an inverse square of the cost per mile of transportation. Combine this with Metcalfe's Law and we reach a dramatic but solid mathematical conclusion: the potential value of a land transportation network is the inverse fourth power of the cost of that transportation. A reduction in transportation costs in a trade network by a factor of two increases the potential value of that network by a factor of sixteen. While a power of exactly 4.0 will usually be too high, due to redundancies, this does show how the cost of transportation can have a radical nonlinear impact on the value of the trade networks it enables. This formalizes Adam Smith's observations: the division of labor (and thus value of an economy) increases with the extent of the market, and the extent of the market is heavily influenced by transportation costs (as he extensively discussed in his Wealth of Nations).''

My encounter with this article of Nick Szabo's was a goosebumps experience for me, cause it coincided with series of lay rants of mine on the old Zennet irc chat room of Tau that ''computation =communication =transportation''. Somewhere in 2016 as far as I remember. :)

Maybe it was the last drop to shape my conviction that by my dedicated involvement in both Tau and ET3 [39], [40], [41], I'm actually working for ... one and a same project.

For communication, computation and transportation being modes of state change. Cause information is a verb, not a noun. And software being states of hardware. ​

''Decentralizing the internet is possible only with decentralized physical infrastructure.'' [42]

Just like the brain is a network computer of neuron nanocomputers [43], the emergent composite we colloquially call humanity or mankind or economy or society or world ... is a network computer made of all us billions of humans.

The Earth is definitely not our ultimate chip carrier [46]. Probably there ain't limit at all of our culture-upon-nature hardware upgrades, see: [47], [48]. The universe is our computronium [49] and we've been here for too short and haven't seen far enough. Networking is connectomics [50]. And thus it always also is metabolomics [51].

Remember my last month's [5] ''Tauchain the Hanson Engine''?

The series of exponentially shortened growth doubling times looks like driven by transportation technological singularities [52]: domestication of the horse, oceanic navigation, combustion engine ...

In the light of all the net forces summoned above: The planet Earth viewed as a giant computer chip ... ​

- itself is a subject of the relentless network entropic [53] force of the Moore's law [54]

The network forces accelerate what that wealth computer does.

Two quick examples:

A.: The $1500 sandwich [55] as a proof that trade+production is at least thousands of times stronger in sandwich-making than production alone.

B.: The example of Eric Beinhocker in his 2006 ''The Origin of Wealth'' [56] about the two contemporary tribes of the Amazonian Yanomami [57] - a stone age population nowadays and the Eastcoastian Manhattanites [58]. That the former are only about 100 times poorer, but the later enjoy billions of times bigger choice of things to have.

Tauchain 'threatens' to affect the parameters of ALL the network forces formulae mentioned herewith in a mind-bogglingly big scale.

Simultaneously, orders of magnitude [59]:

- lower switch cost

&

- higher nodes count [7]

&

- lower connection cost

?!

A wealth hypercane [60] recipe. Perfect value storm. Future ain't what it used to be [61].

In a recent article of mine [1] I hinted my strong suspicion that scaling is itself scalable. ​

''Scaling is a problem. Scaling must be scalable, too. Metascale from here to Eternity.''

No matter what a terrific grower a system is - as per its own internal algorithmic growth drive rules - it seems inevitable its growth to get it into entropic mutualization [2] upon impact with a kind of a ... downscaler.

Scaling is everything, yeah. But it is quite intuitive and supported by too big body of evidence to ignore, that, paradoxically: the faster a thing grows - the sooner its encounter with an external and bigger downscaling factor comes.

This realization, refracted through the prism of our 'reptilian brain' layer [3] amplified to gargantuan proportions by our inherent social hierarchicity [4] is the source of the 'Malthusian [5] anxiety' which led to countless violent deaths over all the human history. Fear is anger [6], so the emotion that there is only as much to go around, and that the catastrophe of 'running out' of something is imminent, is the major source of what makes us bad to each other [7].

There are plethora of examples of very well mathematically and scientifically grounded doomsayer scenarios, and we must admit that they all correct as per their internal axiomatics [8] , and simultaneously they are all totally wrong for missing out the obvious - the factors of externalities [9] , the properties and opportunities of the medium which is consumed and/or created by this growth, and which transcend the axiomatics. For growth being always 'growth into'. The fact that doomsday scenarios are so compellingly consistent internally is what makes them so strong and dangerous ideological weapon of mass destruction [10].

b. the grim visions of the whole Mankind becoming telephone switchboard blue collar workers [13],[4] the number of which should've exceeded the number of total world population by now to achieve the same level of telephonization or

c. the all librarians world [14] where it takes more librarians than the whole mankind to serve the social memory in the paper & printed ink storage facilities mode ...

d. the Club of Rome [15] as the noisiest modern bird of ill omen with 'projections' based on the same blind extrapolations as the urban seas of shit or the 'proofs' of the impossibility to connect or educate or feed all - instigating mass destruction fear that ''we run out of everything and will soon all die'' [16], used for justification for mass atrocities VS Julian Simon's [17] - the ''Ultimate Resource'' (1981, 1996) [18]. Cf.: my accelerando article [19] and see what precisely is the Factory for succession of better and better Hanson drives for the last few millions of years - from the Blade and the Fire to the Tau - it is the same thing which identification made Julian Simon from fanatical Maltusianist [20] into rationally convinced Cornucopian [21] ... the human mind.

e. the predator-pray model [22] which this pseudo-haiku [23] I guess depicts best how's it brutally flawed:​

''hawk eat chic -> less chic, human eat chic -> more chic''

for missing out to posit and failure to account for positive feedback loop [24] of predator over pray dynamics ...

f. The comment of Dary Oster [25] , founder of the other passion of mine - ET3 [26], on the aka 'saturation' of the scalables (exemplified in the field of transportation, which btw, being communication ... our social structures map onto mobility systems we have on disposal ... ).:​

''... US transportation growth has focused on automobile/roads (and airline/airport) developments. (And this has been VERY good for the US economy.) The reason is that cars/jets offered far better MARKET VALUE than horse/buggy/train transport did 150 years ago. In the mid 1800s, trains displaced muscle power for travel between cities - because trains offered better market value than ox carts. Trains reached 'market saturation' about 1895 to 1905 (becoming 'unsustainable') - however 'market momentum' produced 20 years of 'overshoot'. Cars/jets were far more sustainable than passenger trains and muscle power, and started to displace trains (and finish off horses). By 1916 the US rail network peaked at 270,000 miles (today less than 130,000 miles is in use).Just like passenger trains hit market saturation, roads/airports are reaching economic limitations. The time is ripe for a market disruption, and all indicators (past and present) say it will NOT come from, or be supported by government or academia -- but from private sector innovations that offer a 10x value improvement (like ET3), AND also offer incentives for most (not all) key industries to participate (like ET3). Automated cars, smart highways, and electronic ride sharing are industry responses that will contribute to overshoot of cars/roads for the next 5-10 years.The main problem i see with the education system is that is that academic research and publication on transportation is primarily funded by status quo industries like: railroads and rail equipment manufactures, highway builders, automobile/truck manufactures, engineering firms, etc. -- all who fund research centered on 'improving' the status quo.Virtually all universities (for the last 1k years+) are set up to drive incremental improvements that industry demands, and virtually all paradigm shifts are resisted until AFTER they occur and are first adopted by industry. Government is the same (for instance in 1905 passing laws to forbid cars that were disrupting horse traffic; or in 1933 passing laws to limit investment in innovation startups to the wealthy (those successful in the status quo)).''

g. Darwinian algo [27] sqrt(n) VS higher algos - like Metcalfe n^2 [28]. It is not precise, it is more of metaphorical, to indicate direction or scale of scaling, rather then rigorous precision, but ... the former figuratively speaking takes 100 times more to put up 10 times more, and the later takes 10 times more to return 100 times more... h. Barter vs money. See.: [29] bottom of page 5 over the bottomline notes, about the later:​

As demonstration how one item out of a scaling barter system, emerges as specialized transactor and accelerator to transcale the barter economy. From within. Endogenously as always. (btw, Extremely strong document where there are entire books read and internalized behind each tight and contentful sentence!)

i. The heat death of the universe [30] VS the realization that the 2nd law [31] - conservation law for entropy/information law does not allow that [32], the asymptoticity [33] of the fundamental limits of nature, the fact that max entropy grows faster than/from/due to the actual antropy growth [34] and that entropy is not disorder [35] and that at the end of the day it is an unbounded immortal universe [36] ... cause it's all a combinatorial explosion [37].

j. The Anthropic principle [38] and the realization that it is extremely hard if not impossible to posit a lifeless universe [39] ...

k. The Algoverse - my 'psychedelic' vision [27] of the asymptotic inexorable hierarchy of the Dirac sea [40] of lower algos which take everything for almost nothing - up towards giving almost everything for almost nothing - Bucky Fuller's runaway Ephemeralization [41]. Algorithms are things. Objects. Structure. Homoousic or consubstantial to their input and output. Things taking things and making things outta the former. Including other algos of course! Stronger ones.

l. The Masa Effect [42]. The Master of Softbank seeing how the machine productivity is on the imminent course to massively overscale the human clients base and his apparent transcaling solution to upscale the clients base with bots and chips, with the same which scales supply in such a too-much way. [43]

n. Limits of growth - present in any particular moment and in any finitary setting of rules [8], [9] but nonexistent in the infinity of rules upgradability. Like a cancer cell trapped in a cage of light [46] vs ... photosynthesis.

o. Ray Kurzweil - static vs exponential thinking [47].

p. Craig Venter's [48] Human Genome project [49] which when commenced in 1990 was ridiculed that will be unbearably expensive and will take centuries to finish, and it did - it costed a unbearable for 1990 fortune and it did take centuries, of subjective time as per the initial projections conditions - being completed in year 2000.

q. Jeff Bezos vision [50] of Solar System wide Mankind:

''The solar system can easily support a trillion humans. And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources.''

r. The 'wastefulness' of data centers and crypto mining collocation facilities [51] ... which is as funny as to envy the brain for 'wasting' >25% of the body energy. (Btw, the tech megatrend is exponentially and relentlessly towards the minimum calculation energy).

s. The log-scale intuitive measure and smooth straight line visualization coming out of, this quote which I fished out off the net long time ago.:​

"The singularities are happening fairly regularly but at an increasing rate, every 500 to 1000 billion man-years (the total sum of the worldwide population over time). The baby boom of the 1950 is about 200 Billion man-years ago."

ops! go back to Q. With 1 trln. humans population the 'singularities' will occur once a year?!

&

t. the Tau [52][53][54] !!

I can continue with these examples ... forever [wink] - excuse me if I've bored you - but I think that at least that minimum was needed to be shown and it is enough to grok the big picture.

Scaling is the solution. It is a problem too. Its overcoming is what I dub 'Transcaling' for the purpose of that study.

Size matters. Scaling is the way. But the more general is how a system handles change! This is as fundamental as to be in the very core of definition of life and intelligence [55].

Tauchain is all about change handling!

Now, lets knit the 'blockchain' of these all example threads above into a knot like the Norns do [56]:

We the humans (and soon the whole zoo of our technological imitations and reproductions and transcendences of ourselves [42]).

We as the-I [4] are strong thinkers and creators, immensely more road lies ahead than it's been traveled, yes, but yet we, as the-I, are the momentary apex in the Effectoring business [45] in the Known universe ... AND simultaneously we as the-We are mediocre to outright dumb.

We are very far from proper scaling together. The Ultimate resource is not coherent and is not ... collimated. Scattered dim lights, but not a powerful bright mind laser. Dispersed fissibles, but not a concentration of critical masses.

We as The-We - paradoxically- persistently finds ways to transcale its destinies using the power of the-I, but the-We itself does not entertain the scaling well at all [4].

The individual human mind is the unscaled transcaler.

Tau is the upscaler of that transcaler.

I'll introduce herewith another 'poetic' neologism, which occurred to me to depict the scaling props of a system after the Scrooge factor of ''Tauchain - Tutor ex Machina'' [57], and it is the:

Spawn [58] factor

- the capacity and ability of a system to grow through, despite, against, across, from and via the changes. Just like cuboid [59] is about all rectangular things like squares, cubes, tesseracts ... regardless of their dimensionality, the Spawn Factor - to be a generalization of all orders of scaling. Zillion light years from rigor, of course, as I'm on at least the same distance from my Leibnizization [60]. For the lawyer to become a mathematician is what is for a caterpillar to become a a butterfly. :) Transcaling.

Tau transcends the infinite regress of orders of: scaling of scaling of scaling ... by being self-referential. Or recursive. [54]

What is the Spawn factor of Tau?

If you let me I'll illustrate this by a poetic periphrasis of the famous piece of Frank Herbert's [61].:​

I will face my change. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the change has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

With the fluctuation in the price of Bitcoin, there are more voices claiming that the crypto-currency market is a bubble, warning investors about the risks of investing and possibly losing their funds. One of the claims is that virtual coins have no real value. However, by carefully studying this market, the potential investor will discover that some projects include technology, innovation, true vision and strong community, thus creating a fiscal value like that of other successful startup companies.

Today, it is difficult to predict which coin will secure a place among the top currencies on Coinmarketcap. There are large number of projects and buzz-words, used in fancy websites and white-papers, which make it challenging to extract the relevant information and make educated investments. In addition, there are projects that work “under-the-radar” and are very technical to comprehend, discouraging potential investors.

Introducing Tau-Chain

I would like to discuss one of these technical projects that works under-the-radar, without a fancy website or extensive marketing campaign but with brilliant innovation and fast-growing community. The name of the project is Tau-Chain (Agoras tokens on Coinmarketcap), developed by Ohad Asor.

Tau is a collaboratively self-amending program designed to scale human collaboration and knowledge building. To further clarify the explanation, think about a platform that can develop any computer program the user desires, based solely on discussions with his or her team about the program’s specification and development. The use of such a platform can change not only the crypto-ecosystem, but all branches of science.

The Roadmap

Tau’s vision has a long way to go. However, Ohad has developed a detailed roadmap to achieve his vision. Tau will be developed in four stages, as follows:

Tau Meta Language (TML):TML is the base language that will enable all users to interact with each other, no matter what computer language they speak. Think about it as the technology behind Google Translate, but for computer languages, or as Ohad calls it: “the Internet of Languages”.

Alpha:Alpha is a social platform that promotes discussions between infinite numbers of users. Today, an effective conversation cannot be held when too many people take part in the decision-making process (that is why democracy was created). However, Alpha will be able to scale these discussions and detect logical points of consensus between users, thus enabling better knowledge sharing and construction.

Beta:Beta will advance Alpha to enable the development of computer programs, based on user discussions in the platform. To make this more tangible, think of Wix.com where anyone can easily develop a website, even without the technical expertise. With Beta, the code for any computer program will be developed based on specific instructions that the user provides.

Tau: Tau is where blockchain is introduced, thereby creating a decentralized platform (the Tau-Chain), compared to the centralized Beta. Tau will be self-amending and will be able to deduce knowledge based on the information submitted by its users. In its final stage, Tau will amplify the creation of knowledge for its users, advancing current human-knowledge, research and development in different disciplines, such as physics, mathematics and computer science.

The reasoning behind designing the roadmap in four stages is that each stage can support the advancement of the next one. This year we expect the development of the first two stages, TML and Alpha, to be completed. Using Alpha’s discussion platform, an infinite number of developers can join the project to build Beta, expediting its go-to-market date. After Beta is developed, it will only be a matter of time until Tau is completed as all technical challenges will be resolved using Beta.

The legal entity behind this operation is called “IDNI” (Intelligent Decentralized Networks Initiatives), which is composed by Tau’s development team and support units.

So, what is Agoras?

While Tau creates a true knowledge society, Agoras is about creating true monetary knowledge, by powering the ecosystem built via Tau. Agoras will be used to execute the applications of Tau, Zennet (Computational Resource Market), derivatives trading platform and further developments to be built as part of Tau’s ecosystem.

There are 42 million agoras in total. Most of the tokens were sold by Ohad during 2017. The sold tokens, named IDNI Agoras, represent the future Agoras coins holders will receive upon the completion of Tau (fourth stage), where the blockchain is introduced.

The current price of one IDNI Agoras is around ~$2 (traded on Bittrex), which has shown a steady growth throughout the development of the project. The initial code that was released as a proof of concept strengthened the confidence of investors in Tau, compared to competing projects.

I foresee huge potential for this project, and urge you to read and learn about this project and its relevant applications. If you find this vision interesting, I recommend that you follow the project on Telegram, Facebook and Reddit, or readOhad’s blog for further information.

Disclaimer: I have invested in Agoras. Please do your own research before investing in Agoras and/or any other coin or project. Please do not consider this article to constitute financial advice.​

Something Revolutionary In the Crypto Space.​The overwhelming majority of new crypto projects out there fall into 3 main categories:​

A pure currency with a twist, be it anonymity, speed, no transactions fees, no transactions at all etc.

A smart contract platform with a minor adjustment in trade offs - offering less security for more performance, more security for less performance, less security for less performance etc.

A quasi unintentional scam; the sort of idea that sounds pretty good at the pub after you've all downed 6 or 7 drinks, then instead of waking up and realizing it's stupid, proceed to put together a fancy website and kick an ICO based off of it. (I honestly think maybe 90%+ of cryptos belong in this group)

Now the trillion dollar question is this: is just having a currency or shoving a Turing Complete programming language into the blockchain to allow for smart contracts truly the best use of this decentralized innovation? Ohad Asor, creator and lead developer of Tau, does not think so.

tau-chain logo by CapitanArt.

What Is Tau?

Before I start I have to make a confession: I don't truly understand Tau. But I feel that I don't understand it slightly less than people who don't know about it at all, so I'll have a go at explaining it.

Tau is a platform that is designed to scale human collaboration and knowledge building.

Almost every significant piece of technology to date (that isn't about accelerating physical labor) has been primarily focused on the disseminating information or data. The wheel, roads, telephones, the internet are all indispensable achievements that have served to aid getting information from A to B.

But the real value isn't in the data itself, it's from the organization of the information within that data into useful knowledge. While the mere distribution of information is an important step to scaling human progress, it's also only part of the picture. The next step has typically been up to us, the human actors, to use our little brains to distill that information manually until we produce knowledge;

Tau is the first piece of serious technology that is aimed to not only automate the collection of information, but also the production of knowledge, unless you count Netflix's 'AI' recommending 'The Human Centipede' after your toddler has just watched 'A Bug's Life', as successful knowledge discovery made by a machine. Tau is about the industrialization of knowledge creation via taking some of the burden of logical reasoning from us humans and giving it to the machine.

What Can Tau Do?

Ohad has spent years researching and developing Tau. The design is centered around creating a self defining, decidable logic that is expressible under pspace (which is mathematically shown to be the most expressive any self defining and decidable language can be), that will act as a metalanguage for all programming languages defined under Tau.

A trivial example of what this can directly lead to is secure smart contracts. Smart contracts operating under Tau cannot ever give rise to something like the DAO hack - decidable programming languages means one can anticipate the entire spectrum of possible consequences of the code before running it, allowing us to avoid anything unintended. But reliable and secure smart contracts are only a tiny fraction of what the platform can truly offer.

The power of Tau's design will allow it to boast some truly wondrous features including:

Scalable social governance by automatically detecting consensus among its user base via their logical propositions rather than through voting which is mathematically flawed and inefficient.

Scale human collaborative endeavors by organizing the individual propositions of large groups of experts in their respective fields and logically deducing new knowledge from these propositions.

Synthesize code by automatically constructing code from its knowledge base according to the users specifications.

And many more features further along like a knowledge market, automated virtual economy and an advanced derivatives market.

Ohad has yet to fully explain how this will be achieved, but by far the most difficult part is creating the initial decidable, self defining logic system that serves as a metalanguage. Many had their doubts but yesterday Ohad announced that the first and most difficult step towards this end has been achieved. The codehe has written is a working version of the Tau Meta Language which correctly computed a transitive closure graph. This is a proof of concept of the great things to come!

Now that the initial code is released, Ohad is working on a set of explanations about Tau which will outline it's features and how it'll be able to achieve them in more detail. Tau is notoriously difficult to explain, but it's definitely worth the effort to understand it. I'll keep you updated when his explanations are released.

Most people know me as the clown on here who just writes jokes along the lines of taking his mom to the prom after his cousin rejected him or some shit, but I sat my university entrance exams at 16 and scored in the top 0.5% of Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank and took a prestigious course at a well known university. I only bring this up to show that I've had no shortage of dealings with what ordinarily would be considered to be extremely intelligent people, but Ohad is on a completely different level.

Ohad Asor is, quite frankly, the most intelligent and knowledgeable person with whom I've ever interacted. There are many geniuses and child prodigies out there, but Ohad has spent virtually every minute of his waking moments studying up until this point in his life, and he likely has an IQ of over 5 standard deviations above the mean to begin with. I have spoken to him and followed his project over the past 8 months, and my assessment and admiration of his abilities has only increased over this time period.

Here is a short video of him explaining the old design of Tau and some of its features. The information is dated as the new design is far superior, but these features remain.​

English is Ohad's second language - His native language is C.

How Do I Invest In Tau?

Tau itself has no tokens but Ohad is also building Agoras, the first automated marketplace over the Tau collaborative platform. Agoras tokens are currently traded on Bittrex. It has one of the fairest distributions in the cryptosphere and Ohad is only reserving 3% of the tokens for himself. None of that 20% for the founders, 10% for the developers, 20% for the foundation, 15% for the founders' penis enlargement fund bullshit.

Agoras has made considerable gains over the last few weeks but it's total market cap is still under 100 million at the time of writing, which, to me, represents an incredible opportunity for something potentially revolutionary. If we woke up tomorrow without Bitcoin, things would more or less continue as they did, but if we woke up tomorrow without electricity, the world would be an entirely different place. Indeed Tau aims to be the latter: a truly indispensable piece of technology, which is a status that no crypto project has yet reached.

This article isn't to be taken as investment advice any more than it is to be construed as advice on how to get out of the friend zone without resorting to chloroform. I'm not affiliated nor paid by the Tau team in any way. I have not made a single crypto recommendation in my 8 months of being here until now. I just wanted to share something that I think has immense potential to be truly revolutionary, and it also happens to be the only other crypto investment I hold other than Steem.

Feel free to ask some questions after and I'll try my best to answer them.

Special thanks to @dana-edwards and the Steemit platform for allowing me to discover this project

tau-chain.info is not the official site of Tau-Chain. This website has NO affiliation or relationship with the company or IDNI organization, and its contents are neither approved nor supervised by it. The website is dedicated to collaborate with the community and helping Tau and Agoras to progress in a sustainable way.